


Saying Yes to the Dress

by wneleh



Category: Stargate Universe
Genre: Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-30
Updated: 2013-08-30
Packaged: 2017-12-25 01:52:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/947218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/578387/chapters/1037796">Force Over Distance</a>, Cleanwhiteroom uses the characters of Stargate Universe to explore love, friendship, and what it means to be human.  It’s one of the best works of fiction I’ve ever read.</p><p>Near the end of the story, there's an occurrence that had me wondering, how'd they do that, in that timeframe?  This story doesn’t really answer this question; it does, however, satisfy one of my hc_bingo squares, prompt <i>family</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saying Yes to the Dress

**Author's Note:**

Saying Yes to the Dress  
By Helen W.

“Ewwww! Ahhhhhh! Ohhhhh!”

Chloe’s friend Doctor Mama-you’ll-love-her-she-was-one-of-our-best-scientists Lisa, it seemed, was a one-woman sound effects box. Probably great fun to watch fireworks with. Perhaps useful if one needed to evacuate a preschool. 

Definitely not a person Patricia Armstrong would have chosen to spend all morning in a bridal salon with. 

God, she needed a drink.

Chloe turned, slowly and a little unsteadily, atop a low dais, the chalk-white gathered-cotton-and-lace ball-gown-shaped beast she was sporting barely keeping up with her. It was her third of the style, and the worst yet. 

“It looks…” Chloe’s other friend, Tamara Johansen - ah, the stories Patricia had heard about Tamara Johansen! – began. Without an exit strategy, it seemed.

Patricia didn’t feel inclined to give her one. She aimed her best Widow Armstrong smile at her and asked, sweetly, “Yes, Tamara? What were you going to say?”

“I think it’s wonderful!” Lisa gushed, but Patricia kept her gaze on Tamara. “Tell us what you think, Tamara.”

“I keep on thinking, after the wedding, we could use it for bandages,” said Chloe. “Isn’t it funny, how your mind works?”

The three younger women laughed and Patricia turned away. What was wrong with her, that she couldn’t just enjoy shopping with Chloe and her friends? Something that a mere week ago she hadn’t even let herself dream about?

Ah, but in those dreams-she-hadn’t-actually-had, Chloe had been marrying an up-and-coming congressional aid. Or maybe a self-made billionaire of some sort. Or a Kennedy-one of the brighter ones.

Not a lieutenant whose only noteworthy attribute was that he’d managed to be swept up in the same insanity that had taken Chloe from her. A lieutenant who had a child, for God’s sake. And who was planning on maintaining an apartment near said child, and, presumably, said child’s mother, while Chloe was going to Berkeley to study math. MATH. 

Or at least that had been the plan as of breakfast. Who knew what the plan would be come lunch.

The hopefully-but-probably-not liquid lunch.

“What do you think she should try next, Mrs. Armstrong?” Lisa asked.

“I think she’d be lovely in one of those – what do you call them?” She pantomimed a dress that came in at the hips, then flared out mid-thigh.

“Mermaid,” said the saleswoman, whose name Patricia was determined not to learn.

“Mermaid,” Patricia repeated. That’s what she’s heard the style called; she’d hoped that there’d be a better term in professional use, something pseudo-European-sounding like sirena-marvello or maybe syreniette. Still, a number of her friends’ daughters, and daughters’ friends, had worn the style, and Patricia had been sure that Chloe would outshine them all, if she were ever to get the chance.

Chloe looked doubtful. “I really think I want something simpler…”

“Oh, come on, Chlo – let’s BOTH try some on!” said Lisa. 

“Okay, I will if you will,” said Chloe, and then she and Lisa were off with the saleswoman, who was saying something about remembering that, with their non-existent time-frame, they had to limit themselves to blah blah blah.

Leaving Patricia with Tamara. That Woman, in the words of poor, dull Emily Young.

“So…” Tamara began; Patricia turned slightly away from her, and Tamara fell silent.

Chloe and Lisa reappeared in fairly short order, both looking somewhat ridiculous, Lisa elated, Chloe dispirited. Chloe had been right – with her build, her hair, her complexion, the complexities of the dress were unneeded, unflattering even. 

She wasn’t about to give up so quickly, however. “Maybe a different neckline,” she proposed.

“I really don’t think that’s the problem,” said Chloe.

“More beading!” said Lisa. “Let’s try that one we saw…”

“No, you should try that one on,” said Chloe. “I’m going to try this one down a size.”

That wasn’t going to help.

Tamara’s touch started Patricia. “Do you want to take a walk?” she asked. 

“I couldn’t,” she said, but Chloe, Lisa, and the saleswoman were all suddenly looking at them hopefully.

Well then.

\- - - - - -

It was a nice enough day for March in Northern Virginia, meaning that it was neither raining nor snowing, and the air was several months from toxic.

“Drink?” asked Tamara.

“You read my mind,” said Patricia. “Where do you think we can get a mimosa around here?”

“TGIFridays?” Tamara gestured down the street, and, sure enough, there it was, a symptom, if not a symbol, of all that was wrong with life in suburbia. On the other hand, it could presumably handle mixing OJ into cheap champagne as well as anywhere.

Tamara waited until they’d been served before asking, “Is anything wrong, Mrs. Armstrong?”

She had no good answer at the ready, so she went with, “I really wanted the mermaid dress to work.”

“Bullshit,” said Tamara.

Patricia smiled into her drink. “I just wish her father was here.”

“Possible,” said Tamara, “but not acceptable.”

“I’m sad to be losing my little girl so soon after getting her back?”

“Didn’t she visit you at least once a month the whole time we were on _Destiny_? That’s pretty good for a twenty-five-year-old.”

“I don’t like Matt?”

“You don’t know Matt. There’s really nothing not to like.”

“He’s not… well, I think Chloe deserves someone special.”

“Matt worships her. He won’t stifle her. Patricia, Chloe’s always going to have someone in her life. I may be old-fashioned, but she might as well be married to the guy.”

“That’s not something I’d expect you to say.”

“Well, let’s say I learned my lesson there,” said Tamara. She turned and flagged down their server and ordered them a half carafe of sangria, then returned her attention to their conversation. “I imagine you’ve heard all sorts of things.”

Patricia nodded. That Tamara Johansen was carrying the child of her married superior had been the subject of a ninty-minute phone call from Emily Young, to whom Patricia had given her number at a military next-of-kin briefing. Later, Chloe had mentioned that child had died, the result of an injury Tamara had sustained aboard ship late in pregnancy. But Chloe hadn’t provided details, and Patricia hadn’t thought to ask. 

What sort of person did that make her?

Tamara poured herself a glass of sangria and took a long drink, then folded her hands on the table in front of her. “You know what I think your problem is?”

“An empty glass?” Patricia downed the last half-ounce of her mimosa, and then poured herself a glass of sangria.

“I think,” said Tamara, “that you’ve fought so hard, so long, for the brass to get your daughter home that you’ve forgotten how to do anything else.”

Patricia took a sip of the sangria; good enough for before noon on a Thursday. “Kiddo,” she said, “I’ve been fighting since I was a little girl. I fought to get myself into USC. I fought to catch Alan’s eye. I ran his statehouse campaign. I ran his first congressional campaign. I would have run his first go at the Senate but Chloe was, how should I put this, a challenging adolescent. When he finally won, we checked – I’d given over two hundred speeches in six months.”

“Impressive.”

“Damn straight. After all of that, taking on Homeworld Command was no big deal.”

“I can see that. But I think you’ve made my point for me. All you know how to do is fight, fight, fight.”

“NO!” she said, then, more quietly, “I’m tired of fighting. Really and truly.”

“Then do something else.”

“I’m the Widow Armstrong. It’s not a full-time gig, but I can’t walk away from it.”

“Why the hell not?” asked Tamara. “I’m going to med school in September. Chloe’s going to graduate school… what are your contemporaries doing with their lives?”

“They’re all empty-nest lawyers,” she said. “Or, you know, ex-lawyers with perimenopausal five-year-old twins.” 

She swirled her drink around, watching the bubbles stick to the sides of the glass. “It’s funny, but the hardest part of the past few years? Was going to my friends’ children’s weddings, listening to all the chatter about everyone else’s kids. And not being able to say a damn thing about Chloe. When she was all I wanted to talk about. Not just her, but what she was going through.”

“So now you get a wedding of your own,” said Tamara. “Try to enjoy it.”

“Actually, I hate weddings.”

Tamara laughed. “Do you really have friends with five-year-olds?”

“Sure do. I was a child bride. Alan was my Economics TA.”

“Good for you.”

“Thank you.”

Tamara divided the remaining sangria between their glasses. “Drink up,” she said. “I have a plan.”

\- - - - -

They slipped back into the salon amazingly unobtrusively, Patricia thought, given that they were both about as tipsy as one could properly be in public these days. Chloe and her friend weren’t in the look-at-me, I’m-wearing-a-wedding-dress area; Patricia was tempted to sink into the sofa and leaf through _People_ , but Tamara grabbed her arm and whispered, “This way.”

In a moment, they were in the sample room, amongst the mermaid dresses. “Have we learned nothing from this morning?” Patricia asked.

“Not for Chloe, for you,” said Tamara. “Here, try this one.”

“But…”

“You’ve got to wear something, oh mother of bride, true?”

“Not necessarily.”

But right in front of her was the dress that Chloe had tried on…

\- - - - - -

“It really does need womanly curves,” Tamara observed from the sofa as Patricia turned atop the dais, impressively steadily she thought. 

“Agreed,” said Patricia. “But I can’t wear white!”

“Then don’t keep it white. Have it made a different color, or buy this sample and get creative.”

“Think it’ll dye?”

“They can dye shoes, can’t they? They can create wormholes through space? Then they can dye that dress sea foam green.”

“Sea foam green?”

“Tell me you don’t own, like, five sea foam green blouses.”

“Three,” said Patricia. “I travel light.”

She sighed dramatically. “Okay, fine,” she said, “but I’m putting you in peach.”

“Blonds can’t wear peach,” Tamara protested

“Blonds can wear anything.”

“We can’t wear peach. Or yellow, or orange, or…”

“An-y-thing!” Patricia drew out. “I should know, I spent most of the 80s blond. With the right makeup, any hair goes with any color top.”

“Sure, in the 80s!”

“What do you remember of the 80s?”

“Umm… mostly Christmas 1989.”

“MOTHER!”

Chloe and Lisa had appeared, Lisa back in her street clothes, Chloe wearing a beautiful, simple gown that complimented, instead of smothering, her natural, understated beauty. 

Of course, Chloe would have looked even more lovely if she wasn’t gaping, seemingly speechless, up at her.

Lisa squealed, “Who are you, and what have you done with Chloe’s mother?”

“I hope you don’t mind, sweetheart,” said Patricia. “Lt. Johansen” - she waved at Tamara, who issued a half-salute from where she sat - “forbid nudity in the Mother of the Bride.”

“But that’s a wedding dress!” said Chloe.

“I’m going to have it modified so that it doesn’t steel your thunder. Hem it, play with the color.”

“But…”

“That gown is perfect for you, by the way,” said Patricia. “Is it your favorite so far?” She stepped, reasonably gracefully, down from the dais, and moved to give Chloe’s dress a closer look. “I love this stitching at the collar. Subtle, but it gives depth. You really like it?”

“Y-yes. I don’t even have to buy the sample – the turn-around is only a few weeks.”

“Wonderful. So what’s next? The engravers?”

“But mom, you can’t…”

“Yes, dear, I can. I’m saying yes.”

“To the dress?” asked Lisa.

“Among other things,” said Tamara.

* * * THE END * * *


End file.
